May God bless all who sail in her

April 27 2003

A scene from
Russian Ark:
"Nothing is cut,
nothing is
moved, nothing
is reinvented or
added . . ."

Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark is more
than just a major technical feat - it's a bid
to restore high art and religious sentiment
to what the director considers their rightful
place. By Jonathan Jones.

The light is low in Alexander Sokurov's St Petersburg flat; the acclaimed director of Mother and Son (1996), Moloch (1999) and now his stunning celebration of the Hermitage museum, Russian Ark, recently had an eye operation.

The mood seems fitting: Russian Ark begins in darkness. The invisible narrator, Sokurov, says he has no idea where or when he is, but he remembers an accident, a catastrophe. Then suddenly he sees officers and ladies in 19th-century dress, and the camera that represents him is off on its snaking journey, following these would-be Tsarist revellers into the Hermitage, getting lost, hooking up with a cynical Frenchman from the Romantic era who for the rest of the film acts as his and our psychopomp, travelling, swooping, running, stumbling from room to room, seeing history's weight and frivolity - Catherine the Great running off to piss, a terrifying hint of the siege of Leningrad - and always, like time itself, continuing.

Russian Ark was made in a single 90-minute shot. It takes the same time to watch as it took to film, minus the two years of preparation. It is the first film to be made this way, exploiting digital technology not to bend reality but to do justice to it; no film on celluloid could continue unbroken for this amount of time, due to the simple fact that film canisters can hold only nine or so minutes of film.

With its Steadicam journey through the Hermitage's astonishing interiors - filmed by German cameraman Tilman Buttner, and the longest-ever Steadicam shot - Russian Ark is something unexpected. Everyone's first, mounting reaction to Sokurov's film is suspense; a huge cast, complex crowd scenes and intricate dialogue: what if someone coughs or falls over?

In the history of Russian cinema, Alexander Sokurov's decision to make a film in a single shot, in real time, with absolutely no editing seems particularly pregnant. Editing is what Russia contributed to cinema; not just the haphazard scissors-and-paste techniques cobbled together by Hollywood custom, but something altogether more systematic: montage, the dazzling juxtaposition of images to convey meaning - in Eisenstein's hands in the 1920s, it became a great modernist aesthetic, but also a mode of manipulation and propaganda. ");document.write("

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In Sokurov's Russian Ark, nothing is cut, nothing is moved, nothing is reinvented or added at the whim of the all-powerful director. What we see is a direct record of what the camera saw on its journey through the Hermitage. This allows time, experience, to flow unedited and complex on screen: it's not just a technical but an artistic, even philosophical achievement.

It becomes clear that Sokurov is tired of talking about his film as a technical masterstroke; the method of shooting "is only one of the tools", he says, pained by having to go through it again. "This film is not contradicting anything," he says. "If it were, it would mean it was revolutionary."

In fact, the strangeness of Russian Ark, its connoisseurship of time, is an accurate description of what it feels like to visit the Hermitage. All great old museums are places where time stretches, floats, accumulates dust, even has an odour (in Sokurov's film, people sniff paintings). You lose yourself, cut free from linear time into something more oceanic.

The location of the Hermitage is peculiarly disassociated from the everyday. The Winter Palace, built by the 18th-century Baroque genius Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli and restored extravagantly to his designs after the fire of 1837, together with the Small Hermitage that Catherine the Great created as her personal retreat, the Large Hermitage that she built to house her art collection, and the 19th-century New Hermitage that is the only purpose-designed public gallery within the complex, stand along the bank of the river Neva. You look out at a sea of ice, the frozen river; and on the ice, people are walking, skating, fishing. It is a charming fantasy vision of Russia.

Russia's first ambitious art collector was Catherine the Great, the German princess who bumped off her husband to become empress and styled herself the Minerva of the European Enlightenment, commissioning Jean-Antoine Houdon's statue of Voltaire, inviting Diderot to St Petersburg, and then buying his library and paying him as its curator. It is truly impressive how much of the Hermitage's fine art collection can be attributed directly to Catherine, her lovers and her agents.

Everyone makes their own path through this immeasurable museum. This is what Sokurov does, and it is one of the reasons his film is so alive: it is not an attempt to show the whole of the Hermitage, but to follow one specific path, which happens to take in some of his favourite paintings. Only one - El Greco's St Peter and St Paul - was moved to place it on the route; the rest are as you find them.

"The painting in the Hermitage is so fundamental, it is beyond any discussion," says Sokurov. "When you say you prefer this one, it is a little bit shameful; but in fact I like Rembrandt very sincerely with all my heart and I love El Greco since my school years. I am a provincial man, and my first meeting with real paintings was in the Hermitage. Before that I saw lots of paintings by Rembrandt and El Greco in books."

Sokurov's film has a deliberately awkward sense of awe before paintings. Far from showing lovely, clean, perfectly lit shots of paintings, it treats them as difficult and stubborn. In fact, it seems to be an inquiry into how to experience great art. As well as sniffing the paintings, people go so close as almost to touch them, and a blind visitor - in real life a gymnast called Tamara who lost her sight when she was 12 - explains Van Dyck's Rest on the Flight into Egypt. Her casting seems to suggest that art is not only, or necessarily, visual. Blindness is a recurring image in Rembrandt's paintings, and his dark, inner-lit portraits make us feel that we are looking at someone's soul.

Sokurov films paintings from the side, in normal lighting, so that reflections obscure one part of the picture and make the texture of its surface visible. And because he is interested in encounter rather than information, he lingers on just a few paintings; Rembrandts, a Rubens, a Van Dyck, a Tintoretto.

In front of El Greco's St Peter and St Paul, the French traveller abuses a young Russian for not knowing the scriptures. Sokurov loves the religion in old paintings; religiosity of some kind is fundamental to his concept of art. It's one of the reasons he prefers the art of the Old Masters to that of modernism. "The banner of modern art says, 'I want to do this'. On the banner of classic art are the words, 'Everything from God'. They didn't put a crude religious meaning into it - it was simply a modesty. Historically, nothing has changed, and we could have the same banner now. Give me the name of any modern artist who could create something more avant-garde than Turner."

Sokurov is an unapologetic defender of the idea of the museum in its most, superficially, conservative sense. "Museums make culture stable. Museums make the chaos of art into a stable structure. Museums also remind modern artists that there was art before them so they should be modest."

One way of understanding him here, he says, is by contrast with cinema. Cinema, although it has a history of more than a century (and St Petersburg itself is only 300 years old), seems to have no sense of history, of its own history. "Those unlimited things that cinema is doing with no sense of history is due to the absence of cinema museums," says Sokurov.

Russian Ark is a film that celebrates high culture unequivocally. I tell him how British museums want to be part of a youthful, urban culture. His film, I say, seems pleasurably melancholic in its respect for the stillness of museums. "I don't think it is melancholia; it is a delicacy. Great paintings and statues are, so to say, scared of brightness and glare. They demand a very quiet attention towards them. Of course it is all the same for the paintings, but it demands silence. Flirting with youth is like flirting with Nazism, and you mustn't do this."

Sokurov's title, Russian Ark, is an anxious one, implying a threatening disaster, a coming flood from which the Hermitage alone can protect high European culture. It is also an intervention in the endless debate, as old as the Hermitage, about Russian identity and Russia's place in Europe. Russia didn't slavishly copy Europe, says the film; rather, it cherished high European art and culture, from Wedgwood to Voltaire, more passionately than the British or French themselves. In Alexander Sokurov's vision, Russia is a great interpreter and preserver of European high art, the last place where it is still respected and loved and protected.